People don't wait for new programming languages the same way they wait for a bus. If you wait 30 minutes for a bus that you would expected to come after five minutes, you are angry that you lost 25 minutes, and decide to take the 10 minutes walk to the next subway station, or take a taxi.

That's not how people wait for Perl 6. They use other programming languages (often Perl 5) in the same time, and don't lose any time anticipating a Perl 6 release that will be useable in their production environment. So the 12 years of waiting aren't 12 wasted years for anybody (except if somebody really was that foolish not to use any other programming language in the mean time).

And thus those 12 years aren't really a problem for most of us. When somebody tells you about a cool programming she just started using, does it really matter if that language has been 2 or 12 years in the making?

To stretch the analogy a bit further, it's a bit more like waiting for electrically powered cars. When a company starts selling powerful and affordable electric cars, I'll buy one, and won't make ridiculous claims like "The world has moved on", just because they were long in the making.

Perl 5 has fundamental flaws that aren't being addressed by any future plans for Perl 5 development that I've seen so far, just as gas powered cars have a fundamental flaw in the long run (limited fuel availability). Gradual improvements (like more efficient fuel usage) help for a certain time, but they can't replace a fix for the fundamental problems.